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Tom Law The calendar reads December 10. It feels more like October 10, or maybe April 10. Regardless we’ll take it here in upstate New York, where we gutted out a brutal winter that started before Thanksgiving 2014 and extended until nearly April this year.
The text pinged a little after 8 p.m. last Friday – Black Friday to some, not for our camp that spent the day hiking at the Mohonk Preserve in the Catskills – asking if we’d be game to “venture back south for our annual tradition of the Reindeer Run on 12/4?”
Valerie Buck was taking a litter of kittens to the veterinarian this fall when she got the call she didn’t think would come, the one she convinced herself not to expect and the one that ultimately reunited her with a favorite horse from a previous life.
Barely seven months from his last start, nearly three years removed from the biggest win of his racing career and in a venue that feels nothing like the racetrack, Called To Serve was still turning heads and still winning.
Bill Ryan, an attorney from Albany, New York, was so impressed with Darby Dan Farm during a trip to Lexington a few years ago that he wrote owner John Phillips a letter.
He didn’t expect a reply, but he got one and a piece of a horse, too.
Canada geese returned to the infield of Saratoga’s Oklahoma Training Track Sunday morning, a pit stop on their migration and a place nearly vacant of its equine inhabitants sans for a few stragglers soon to join their fowl friends at warmer points south.
Every owner, trainer or rider that came with a horse to last month’s Retired Racehorse Project’s Thoroughbred Makeover at the Kentucky Horse Park also brought at least one fascinating story with them to Lexington.
Racing fan Nick Cerza relaxed with a cheese plate and a pint from a legendary Vermont brewery as he presented the question of the season – or maybe the year – Saturday night just outside the warmth and orange glow from the Henry Street Taproom fireplace Saturday night.
Amazingly we’re a week removed from the 2015 Breeders’ Cup World Championships yet still in the process of unpacking, digging out and going through notes and voice recorders for snippets of information from a whirlwind weekend in Lexington.
We loosely called ourselves the “OTB Club.”
At various times of the week, when all our classes for the day at Castleton State College were finished, we’d pile in the car and make the 20-minute drive across the state line to catch the races at the Whitehall OTB. Located up on a hill on Route 18 across from a cemetery, the OTB parlor shared space with a restaurant and bar.
